Francis Davis, a prolific jazz critic with a sharp eye and ear for music’s cultural context, died on Monday at his home in Philadelphia. He was 78.
His wife, Terry Gross, the host of the NPR program “Fresh Air,” said the cause was emphysema and complications of Parkinson’s disease.
As a contributing editor at The Atlantic for more than a quarter-century and a columnist at The Village Voice for even longer, Mr. Davis wrote hundreds of articles on music, film, television and popular culture, focusing on jazz — an art form he both celebrated and bemoaned, worried that its future would not live up to its past. (He also wrote for The New York Times and other publications.)
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
His specialty was teasing meaning from the sounds he heard, situating them in America’s history, culture and society. That approach, and the fluency of his writing, made him one of the most influential writers on jazz in the 1980s and beyond, drawing a wide readership and praise from other critics. The cultural figures and artifacts he took on — Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, “Seinfeld,” Billie Holiday, the director William Wyler — amount to a group portrait of America in the postwar years, largely in the pages of The Atlantic.
One reviewer wrote of “Jazz and Its Discontents” (2004), one of seven books Mr. Davis published, that his “insights, investigations and opinions” were “funny, fierce and fair.”Credit…Da Capo Press
“He is a sensitive, knowledgeable, perceptive, imaginative critic, and even when he’s moping he’s a pleasure to read,” The Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley wrote of Mr. Davis’s 1990 collection, “Outcats: Jazz Composers, Instrumentalists, and Singers.”
Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.